Steve Jobs Called Up Yelp And Said Don't Sell Out To Google

Steve Jobs really was willing to go out of his way to make sure Google didn’t get what it wanted.Back in 2010, Jobs went so far as to personally call up Yelp’s CEO Jeremy Stoppelman to tell him not to sell his company to Google. That’s according to a new profile of Stoppelman in the San Francisco Chronicle.

At the time, Google was said to be in talks to acquire Yelp for more than half a billion dollars.

One day, Stoppelman was on a conference call with investors when someone passed him a note saying, “Steve Jobs is on the line.” Here’s what happened next:

On the phone, Jobs urged Stoppelman, who revered the Apple chief as a visionary, to “stay independent and not sell out to Google.” Jobs was not a fan of Google and had accused the search giant of stealing Apple’s smart-phone and tablet technology.

“At that point, we had already turned down Google,” Stoppelman said. “But Steve liked Yelp and wanted to make sure about Google. It was a moment where I said, ‘This is crazy. What just happened?'”

Fast forward a couple years and Yelp now has a market cap of well over $1 billion. What’s more, Apple and Yelp have developed a very close relationship. Apple is adding Yelp’s local listings into its new iOS 6 mapping application and Apple is rumoured to be adding Yelp check-ins to iOS 6 as well.